Winning by numbers: how performance analysis is transforming sport

This article was taken from the July 2012 issue of Wired
magazine. Be the first to read Wired's articles in print before
they're posted online, and get your hands on loads of additional
content bysubscribing
online.

Soon after becoming a professional
squash player at age 18, Nick Matthew left his coach. He brought in
David Pearson, then England's national squash coach, and
performance analyst Stafford Murray. Matthew had been playing since
the age of eight and had consistently ranked among the top junior
players in the UK. He was a strong athlete -- he had been a
cross-country runner for many years -- and typically won by wearing
down his opponents. But as a senior player his physicality was no
longer an advantage against much stronger opponents. He realised
that he wasn't good enough.

"His technique was not the best,"
says Murray. "He was very strong, and mentally one of the best. But
you talk about naturally gifted players and he certainly wasn't
one." Murray is the head of performance analysis and biomechanics
at the English
Institute of Sport (EIS) in Manchester, overseeing 25
staff who work across all national sports teams. In his
mid-thirties, he has the no-nonsense manner of a sports coach and
the academic enthusiasm of a scholar. Murray was mentored by Mike
Hughes, who pioneered performance analysis in the early 80s, using
PCs to record and process data in real time during squash matches.
"I tell my students -- Stafford is the best performance analyst in
the country," says Hughes.

When Murray began working with
Matthew, they would meet four times a week. Murray would bring
cameras to the court and analyse Matthew's technique using Dartfish, a
video-based software program. Murray saw that Matthew was mostly
using his wrist, rather than his whole body, when taking a backhand
shot; as a result, he couldn't generate much power. Using Dartfish,
Murray would break down the movement in strobe motion. He would
also compare it with how Matthew was performing that same move
previously by overlaying a ghost image on the screen. Matthew would
hit a dozen balls and then look at the monitor. His coach would
feed him the ball slowly, as if he were a beginner. He would spend
hours on court each day, just practising his backhand, over and
over.

"I had been playing since I was a
kid and now I was learning how to hit a ball from scratch," Matthew
says. "I felt a lot of self-doubt. I kept thinking, 'Do I really
need to go through this? I'm already a good player.' It was the
hardest thing I've ever had to do." When he began training with
Murray in 2001, Matthew had been playing squash for 12 years and
was ranked among the top 100 players in the world. It took him two
years to relearn how to hit a ball but, by 2004, he had climbed to
the top ten. Six years later, he became the world's number one
player.

In December 2010, Matthew played
against his compatriot James Willstrop in the final of the Saudi
PSA World Open Squash Championship. Matthew had already beaten the
four-time world champion Amr Shabana in the semifinals, and won the
final against Willstrop by three sets to one, winning the last two
games 11-2 and 11-3. "Destroying someone with my squash game as
opposed to tiring him out was unique for me," says Matthew. "That's
when it all came together."

***

In elite sports, being the most talented is no longer
enough; top athletes also have to ensure they are the better
prepared.They understand that their only sustainable advantage is
to learn and improve faster than their opponents. The technology
used by performance analysts allows them to measure every force,
dissect every movement and time every action with absolute
precision. That feedback allows athletes to find areas for
improvement and aids the learning of new skills.

In the general domain of skill
expertise, objective feedback rarely follows action. Experimental
physicists have to wait for years to obtain validation of their
theories; doctors seldom get immediate confirmation that their
diagnoses are accurate. Elite athletes, on the other hand, can get
immediate and precise feedback for every movement that they make,
right down to the tiniest manoeuvre. They have become used to using
scientific knowledge and data feedback to optimise the way they
train, making it more efficient and effective. Coaches call this
"accelerated learning". Elite athletes haven't merely mastered
their sport. They have mastered the art and science of
learning.

At the EIS, Murray's team of performance analysts and
biomechanists are working with Olympic athletes as they prepare for
the London 2012 Olympic Games. From tae kwon do to sailing, from
cycling to boxing, Murray's team of performance analysts collects
data and analyses it. "The fundamental methods are generic. The
guys working with the sailing team will have a look at what the tae
kwon do analysts are doing and the guys in boxing will come down to
study the methods of the squash analysts," Murray says.

At the Manchester Velodrome, BAE
Systems has developed a timing system based on military technology
that uses lasers and bar codes on athletes to give exact
identification, split times and velocity data. Bikes have
instrumented cranks that capture force measurements, velocity and
acceleration. The data is logged in real time via a system
developed by McLaren and performance analysts stream the video of
the cyclists' workouts directly to the coaches' iPads. It has paid
off: the British cycling team brought home 14 medals at the 2008
Beijing Olympics. Performance
analysts also make extensive use of Dartfish, created at the Swiss Federal Institute of
Technology in Lausanne, which allows them to record
performance, annotate video clips, overlay extra footage and add
time codes.

Murray likes to cite a particular
statistic: coaches can recall only about 30 percent of what they
see during a competition. In other words: 70 percent of potentially
vital information goes unnoticed. That's where his expertise as a
performance analyst lies -- in finding objective data that will
make his athletes accelerate their learning and outperform the
competition. "I worked with a squash player who wasn't hitting the
ball at the right point during the swing," Murray says. In squash,
he explains, players should take the ball on the top of the bounce
when it comes off the floor. If you take it on top of that
trajectory, you're not giving your opponent any time to get their
breath back. "This player was hitting it just off the top of
bounce," he says. "I calculated his timing and estimated that he
was losing about two minutes throughout the match. He was basically
giving his opponents two extra minutes. This is the sort of data
that we have to find. If we're not changing their behaviour and
accelerating the way they learn new skills, we're
failing."

Comments

Very good article that demonstrates that without technology not only you do not win but you cannot make it to the next level.

Victor Bergonzoli

Jun 26th 2012

Great article. It clearly shows the value of using video assisted coaching tools

Chuck Wilmot

Jun 26th 2012

So when will US money and technology produce a world class footballer? How is it that the Ivory Coast can produce a Drogba and Kalou winning the champions league but the US is unable to with all of their technology?